Sun Valley Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Sun Valley is a northeastern San Fernando Valley neighborhood between Burbank and Pacoima, organized around San Fernando Road and Sunland Boulevard. Predominantly single-family homes mixed with industrial and gravel-pit land along the Tujunga Wash.
Seven categories moved in Sun Valley in April 2026 — four ran below trend in the current month, and three registered as sustained structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across both property crime and violent crime, with no spikes or rare-event signals in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the strongest single signal: 256 incidents over the trailing 12 months against a baseline mean of 418.25, and down 41.0% against the prior year. Theft from vehicle fell 29.9% year-over-year (251 current vs. 358 prior), and sexual assault dropped 54.8% (14 vs. 31). Burglary, robbery, aggravated assault, and vandalism all ran lower as well — every tracked category with enough volume to register moved in the same direction.
Notable signals 4
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 256 incidents — about 39% below the 418 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 251 incidents — about 35% below the 387 average from prior years.
Sexual Assault
The past 12 months saw 14 incidents — about 55% below the 31 average from prior years.
Burglary
The past 12 months saw 157 incidents — about 30% below the 223 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 256, down 41% from 434 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Theft from Vehicle has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 251, down 30% from 358 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 157, down 28% from 219 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through April 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Sun Valley compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable motor vehicle theft levels.”
Westchester
257 incidents over the past 12 months — 1 above Sun Valley's 256.
Open page →Valley Glen
263 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Sun Valley's 256.
Open page →Pacoima
242 incidents over the past 12 months — 14 below Sun Valley's 256.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
When Sun Valley has spiked other larceny historically (18 events on record), an adjacent neighborhood spiked the same category within 3 months 100% of the time. The strongest-travelling categories sit at the top of the table.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 18 | 100% |
| Vandalism | 15 | 100% |
| Burglary | 6 | 66.7% |
| Sexual assault | 2 | — too few |
| Theft from vehicle | 2 | — too few |
| Aggravated assault | 1 | — too few |
Each row shows Sun Valley's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 7 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Los Angeles); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sun Valley, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Counts from March 2024 onwardrun roughly 10 to 20 percent below LAPD's command-staff totals citywide. LAPD's legacy crime feed froze after a late-2024 cyber incident, and the replacement NIBRS feed has been shipping fewer rows than LAPD's own statistics show. The shortfall is most visible in homicide and in dense south-LA neighborhoods, because the new feed lacks coordinates and resolves location through reporting districts. Trend direction is still meaningful; absolute levels are not directly comparable to LAPD's headline figures.
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from LAPD's open feed on the LA City Open Data portal — the NIBRS-coded feed from 2024-03 onward with UCR backfill to 2020. Mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.